


The Poetry of Logical Ideas

by TrenchcoatButtons (orphan_account)



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Bullying, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Other, jerk dad, using math to solve relationships and personal problems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-05
Updated: 2013-08-18
Packaged: 2017-12-22 12:17:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/913123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/TrenchcoatButtons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Never tell a child they cannot do something. They will spend the rest of their lives proving you wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So Hermann Gottlieb, right? I love him. He's my favorite character. This is his life. Or at least, how I have pieced it together in my mind. None of this is strictly canon. It’s put together based off of passages from the novelization, dossiers, the drift sequences in the movie, and the art book. Again, not strictly canon, but guessed about based on what we know. Call this something of a rambling, tear-stained character study on a guy who I want to know everything about, and who I feel a lotta mama bear defensive feelings about. It's unbeta'd, so... yeah.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.'
> 
> -Archimedes, as referenced by Pappus of Alexandria Collection  
> In reference to his work with Levers.

 

It is 1989.

His life begins as many do.

He is born in a hospital, he has two parents, and he will never want for siblings. Karla and Dietrich before him, Bastien three years later.

He is a quiet baby, almost serious, but he smiles within the first week and his mother knows just where to tickle his toes to get him in a fit of gurgling laughter. His earliest memory is of sun streaming in an open window, and a mobile above him, airplanes spinning in a slow and lazy circle around his head. He was very young then, he thinks, maybe two or three. About to leave the crib.

  
\-----

  
He starts school at age six. He loathes finger painting and crayons and playing ball with his schoolmates. He sits in corners and builds towers and buildings, and on the top of the tallest tower he balances a boxy robot with brightly colored gemstone eyes. He wears a prop flight helmet and holds a toy biplane. The biplane zooms through the city, a guided aerial tour of the thing he has built. He can see himself in the tiny cockpit seat, can imagine the laid out grid of city streets and straight boxy lines in greys and blues, the glitter of a ruby red robot at the top of the tallest tower. He is so proud of that city, so proud of that airplane, so entranced by the colored edges of the toys.

Two boys throw a ball and destroy the tower, and the robot’s faux gemstone eye pops off and lands amongst the debris. They laugh at him when he picks up the robot and cries.

He tells his father and his father tells him that sometimes life is like that, and he will have to get used to it.

It is 1995, and six year old Hermann Gottlieb thinks he hates his father a little bit.

  
\-----

  
Three years and as many months later, Lars Gottlieb packs up his family and they move from bright and airy Garmisch-Partenkirchen and to overcast, watery England. Cambridge is nice, he thinks, but he is always cold, it was colder back in the mountains, but he feels colder here, and the chill never quite leaves his bones. He turns nine that year and he spends it with his parents and siblings, because he has yet to make any friends.

He discovers quickly that he never will, despite the optimistic air his mother conveys.

He skips two levels and ends up in Secondary school with children two and three years his senior, he is the smallest and he has big ears and he is always wrapped tight in a warm coat. He speaks English very well, but the accent is thick and they make fun of his words. They laugh at him and call him names like Hermann the German, and while he knows there is A: nothing wrong with being German and B: it's not a creative or strictly offensive taunt at all, it still infuriates him everytime he hears it sing-songed at him. They pull pranks like covering his seat in tape and playing keep away with his school bag, or they sneak up behind him and tug his ears until they turn red as an old toy robot far away in Bavaria.

He swiftly surpasses his schoolmates at everything academic, jumping levels quickly and drinking in knowledge like water to a thirsty man. Karla and Dietrich needle him and needle him to do their homework for him, and because he wants their affection, he does. But he cannot do his classmates homework, and they use that as even more leverage to threaten him and tug his ears. His mother says ‘boys will be boys’ and his father says ‘sometimes life is like that’ and his siblings tell him to ‘stop exaggerating’.

It is 1998 and he hates them, he hates them, he hates them so much.

  
\-----

  
He is eleven and he is doing advanced mathematics on the board in front of his schoolmates, and they are all thirteen and fourteen and don’t want to hear an eleven year old tell them how to do equations. They drop pencils and bang their desks and no matter what the teacher does to quiet them down, they refuse to let him finish the problem, and so he shuffles back to his desk in his big coat and with his big ears.

They laugh and he can hear them say how much of an idiot he really is, no matter how he’s got the teachers fooled, he’s an idiot, an idiot who talks funny and knows too much.  
He spends weeks and then months training himself to talk like they do, to get rid of the German accent that follows him like a dark cloud. They mock the harsh way he says words and so he softens it, and tries to speak like everyone else. But they still tell him he’s an idiot, and they still tell him he has stupid ears, and still shove and push him down in the schoolyard. He tries a thousand and one different strategies to make them like him, to make them leave him alone, to make them ignore him. Even ignoring would be preferable to the name calling and the stolen schoolbags.

He grows sour, he curdles like spoiled milk, he cultivates a scowl to keep them at bay. He dives into his books and his numbers and he builds a wall of integers and decimal signs. When they try to steal the answers to a test, he gives them the wrong numbers, and the black eye is almost worth it for the knowledge that he one-upped them. Knowledge is his defense, whether it’s the space diagonal between two fixed points that means he will escape the school faster at the end of the day, or the lines and curves of a bright red 100% on his last test. He finds comfort in numbers and lines and fixed points, in the words 'well done, Hermann' from a teacher.

But they still shove and they jeer and Hermann the German follows him no matter how fast he runs or how good his grades are.

He wishes he was an adult. He wishes he was bigger than them, older than them, tougher than them. Wishes he was the teacher in front of the blackboard, holding the chalk and barking at them to quiet down and be respectful.

  
\-----

  
It is 2000, and he tells his father he wants to fly airplanes. He says he’s been studying them, he knows exactly what he wants to do, he wants to fly a biplane in the mountains. He says he wants to see the world from up high, wants to watch towns and cities float away beneath him. He wants to see the grids and the curves of the world below him.  
His father tells him that’s impractical. What money is to be made in frivolously riding around in the skies? What’s the use, what’s the point? You are good at math, you are good at calculus, you are good at trigonometry, you should do that.

Hermann wonders why he cannot do both, but does not say that.

His father takes the book on planes that Hermann holds in his hands, and sets it high on a shelf that the boy cannot reach. He is not tall enough, and he refuses to ask someone to get it for him. Not Karla, not Dietrich, not mother, and most certainly not little Bastien, who is still too busy with his blocks and his toys. He feels so impossibly small, staring up at the top ledge of that book shelf, the wing of a plane just barely visible on the spine of that book.

He feels his entire life, sometimes, revolves around being too far down on the ground.

Occasionally, when no one is home, he stacks books on top of a chair and tries to reach the top shelf. But he is too small and the wobble of the chair terrifies him, so he climbs carefully down and puts the books and chair away.

Days pass by incredibly predictably, his mother and father work long hours in their respective labs, Karla and Dietrich ride away to see friends on their bikes, even Bastien gets picked up for playdates. School and home in equal measure. He does not have any friends, he is too smart, too mature to have playdates, does not like riding bikes, does not like playing football. He sits in his room and he reads and he finds equations to challenge himself, and sometimes, if he’s feeling particularly brave, he will go into his father’s study and use the computer.

It is on that computer that Hermann finds what will inevitably lead him to his future.

  
\-----

  
It is 2004 and the name Alan Turing blares at him on a white page, filled with text.

The words ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘Persecution’ hit him in ways he has never quite understood, and for the first time since he built a block city and flew a plane in circles around a brightly colored tower... He gets excited.

He doesn’t quite understand the personal aspect of Turing’s life, he doesn’t quite grasp the weight of homosexuality and how Turing was treated for it. (Hermann himself has never felt much of an interest in romance, he has hated and loathed nearly every boy and girl he has ever come across outside of his own family.) But he understands that Turing had something about him that made people hate him, that they forced him to be something he wasn’t, and that drove him to the edge and beyond.

But it never quite stopped him. His life ended but his studies remained, and they paved a way forward into a new era. Hermann soaks in the idea of human computers, or computers that think like humans, wonders what it would be like to speak on the same level to an inanimate object. Wonders what it would be like if the keyboard he typed Turing’s name on started typing back at him.

Turing never stopped, never stopped building and writing and thinking. The world brought him down, but he gave so much to it before he left. He cared about what he did, despite the way everyone treated him.

It is a little after one on a sunday, his mother is due home from her book club any time now, and he is sitting in front of his father’s computer, seeing the world in a remarkable new light. Sun streams in from the window, and high above him he sees the dusty wing of a plane on the binding of a book. He has grown a few inches since he last tried, and he is still growing, but maybe this time... Maybe this time...

On the computer is Alan Turing’s face, on the shelf is a book on biplanes.

Hermann Gottlieb feels as though he is standing at a crossroad.

He knows the book by heart, it’s the principle of the thing. If he can get that book down from the shelf on his own, then Hermann Gottlieb is going to be a pilot. If not? Turing has awoken something in him that he doesn’t remember being there. If he cannot get it, he will create an artificial intelligence. He will prove the Turing test correct, not just for Alan Turing, but for himself.

He gets the thickest books in the study, he gets the tallest chair he can find in the house, and he stacks them together. He clambers up, careful step by careful step, and he stretches out his arm as far as he can reach. Stained wooden book shelf before him, the bindings of a hundred texts in front of his eyes and an arm full of them beneath his trainers. He is not quite there, he has to stretch up, but he knows he can reach it. For the first time he does not curse his shortness, but relishes in how high up the books on the chair make him feel. He inches up onto his toes, and he lets go of the back of the chair, feeling steady, feeling strong.

For a few minutes, he believes in fate. He believes God has chosen him for something.

He can feel the tips of his fingers brush the binding of the book, can feel the rush of victory, of defiance at his father’s old words of practicality and what he’s good at.  
He has just enough time to think- _This must be what it feels like to fly_ \- before something cracks in the tall backed chair piled high with books. He has just enough time to feel terrified before the chair breaks and the books tumble to the ground, and he tries to twist in midair but it happens too fast, and then all he feels is a sharp crack in his leg, and the feeling that -something- has torn. Hermann screams and cries and clutches at his leg, and he hears the door slam open, his mother running in from the book club. She yells his name and asks what happened but all he can do is cry and clutch his leg.

She rushes him to the hospital, and the doctor’s words are nothing compared to all the speeches about practicality his father has given him.  
Things like growth plate, and shattered, and a clean break have no meaning. Things like physical therapy and ‘landed very badly’ don’t matter as much to him as does the fact that the book is still so high on that shelf.

(Somewhere in his mind a part of him that cares about the injury, about what it might mean, is furious. Is furious and says _Father did this, father put the book on the shelf, this wouldn't have happened if it weren't for father and now you're paying for what he's done_. But he never says it out loud and he wonders if his father ever discovered what he was reaching for that day. And if he did, did he care?)

His father yells, asks him what he was doing on that chair in the first place, and for a while the house is a boiling pot of heated German between his mother and father. But it simmers down and things return to normal, except he misses a lot of school and he has to use crutches and wear a big itchy cast for a long time.

He asks Karla, his oldest sibling, if she will get the book he wanted down from the shelf for him. She does,and she presses the old book into his hands. Karla tells him he should have known better than to do something so stupid, but she also kisses the top of his head and says she’s really glad he’s okay.

It doesn’t make him feel any better, but he finds that he appreciates it.

  
\-----

  
It is 2005, Hermann Gottlieb is fifteen years old, and he gives the book on planes to his little brother Bastien. They share a bedroom, and while Hermann pours over his own version of a Turing machine, he can hear Bastien making airplane noises over the toybox.

  
\-----

  
He is sixteen when he gets a cane.

There’s very little to-do about it, really. His leg hasn't been the same since he fell, it isn’t quite growing as long as his other leg, and on very rainy days the old break smarts a little. He was fine for a while after the cast was removed, but as he grew the limp became more and more pronounced. The doctor tells him he has probably topped out as far as height goes, and it’s unlikely the leg will ever match up to his other one. Growth plate injuries run that risk.

The leg itself hurts sometimes, usually depending on the weather and how active he's been. There is a bit of a curve to his shin along the old surgery scar and if he stands flat on his feet one leg has to bend to match up to the other, keeping him an inch shorter than he should be. It doesn't bother him, really, it's just a new part of him, it doesnt change him, and nobody really ever makes any mention of it. It adds nothing and takes nothing away, it merely is.

So, he gets a cane. It’s topped with a wooden handle and is little more than a long dark stick that clicks with his every step. It becomes an extension of his being, it becomes a part of him. During late nights when he feels desperate to leave Cambridge and gets oddly poetic, he thinks the cane is a replacement for something. He’s not sure what, but it feels like an old friend, comforting to have in his grip and a grounding weight. It makes him feel... In control. Adult. Sophisticated. He latches onto that, and his stance changes, his world skews in his favor somehow, makes him feel like he's far more sturdy on his feet than he ever was as a boy.

The only time he hates the cane is when he tries to ask a girl out in front of his school, and she tells him no. The answer is fine, he feels no crushing heartbreak or anger over the answer. Except one of her friends apparently thinks he never should have even spoken to her, because she strides by and kicks the cane out from under him mid-step and he falls to the ground and the cane goes clattering beside him. A few people make to help him up but he snarls for them to get away and snatches up his cane. He gets to his feet on his own and the girl he asked out tries to apologize for her friend.

And at the end, it isn't the cane he hates that day. It's the fact that his cane was used against him, when all it had ever done was help him.

  
\-----

  
It is 2006, and he has early acceptance to TU in Berlin.

His father claps him on the shoulder, tells Hermann he's proud, tells him he knew he could do it. He cannot help feeling a strong sense of sticky resentment towards his father's sudden show of good faith. He loves the praise, loves being told he will excel, that he is remarkable. For all accounts, he should be happier than anyone else on the planet that his father is talking animatedly about course selection and degrees and job opportunities and the future and... Hermann cannot shake the feeling that Degrees are the only thing his father cares about. Yes, his son is going to college, but it's more exciting about what it's FOR than WHO is going. He grips the head of his cane with white-knuckles and smiles and agrees and plots out his preferred course schedule.

He also begins counting down the days until he leaves.

  
\-----

  
In 2007, the moment he is able, he leaves home and moves into the dorms there.

Berlin is remarkable and it suits him like a glove. It is an old city, and it is steeped in history. His roommate is from Hamburg, and for the first time in ten years he speaks almost exclusively German. He makes acquaintences and begins to get, for the first time in his life, a breathing social life. Eighteen years such a thing has only vaguely existed in the periphery of his world, and it seems now, in a place of advanced academia, that is has finally gained a pulse. Albeit a somewhat reedy one. He does not go out and party, doesn’t go to bars and find women or men to pick up and bring back to the dorm. No, he’d much rather stay in and have a cup of tea, read and write and learn, maybe listen to some music. Still, he has people who he has things in common with, and that is something.

His classmates and those in his dorm are just as in love and devoted to what they’re learning as he is, they have to be to be studying at this kind of university. He engages in lengthy discussions and finds himself being challenged for the first time in his life, the thirst for validation and agreement is almost intoxicating. He gets on fabulously with his roommate, who, despite his proclivity for locking Hermann out of the room for his dalliances with the opposite sex, is one of the nicest and most intriguing people to bounce ideas off of.

As far as romance goes, Hermann spends too much time the first year falling in love with Berlin and with Engineering and Physics and falling in love all over again with simple equations to worry about that.

  
\-----

  
It is 2009 and he is in his third year of courses, working towards his Doctorate in Engineering and Applied Sciences. He has a string of brief romantic interests in this year, and while most are one off moments and dates, there are a few where he feels as if he’s in for the long haul. It always ends up not being the case with the other party, however. The first tells him he’s too serious, the second says she’s found someone else, and the third...

The third he is in love with. He knows it. He thinks maybe he’d like to marry her, someday, and when they’ve been together for six months he quietly asks her what she thinks marriage might be like. (He wouldn’t ask her that soon, no, they’re too young, but he wonders...)

She says she’d love to get married, someday, she thinks it would be wonderful.

He keeps that phrase in his pocket for another month, and then one day he walks into the room and he finds her on top of his roommate, who he'd thought, foolishly, to be his friend, both naked as the day they were born.

He immediately files for a room change, and she tries to smooth things over, but it comes to light that she’s been sleeping with his roommate for four of the seven months they were together. He never speaks to either of them ever again.

Like he did as a child, Hermann falls into math and his studies, and in another three years he has finished his dissertation, earned his doctorate, and moved into an almost painfully small apartment in Cambridge. He is working with his father, of all people, writing code and quickly surpassing the people around him in both knowledge and expertise. He never stops reading, never stops learning, fills chalkboard after chalkboard with equations.

He gets into heated debates with his father about artificial intelligence, about Turing, about what Hermann can and cannot do.

All the debates, all the fights, end in the same vein.

His father does not think he can.

Hermann snaps a piece of chalk in his force to finish an equation, and decides that he will.

\-----

  
It is mid afternoon on August 10th, 2013.

He is sitting in the main room of his tiny apartment, writing code for a side project, when his phone goes off. It is Karla, his sister, imploring him to turn on the news, call father, turn on the news Hermann, pick up your phone but turn on the news.

He runs through a series of possible horrifying scenarios his family or the world could be going through, and when he turns on the news and sees the live feed, it is far beyond anything he could ever imagine. Half a world away, the Golden Gate Bridge has just been torn into pieces like a ribbon on Christmas.

His phone is making more noise, probably Karla wondering if he’s turned on the news or called father yet, but he can’t look away, pulls his glasses off to stare and gape and boggle at the images unfolding on the screen. He sees from the view of a chopper hovering around the behemoth’s head, the massive fringe of scale and flesh and bone and a blue haze bleeding from it’s mouth. He sees military jets speeding overhead, trying to get a shot in on it that actually DOES something. But nothing is hurting it, nothing at all, it’s like the creature doesn’t even feel it.

The monster is so big that the camera cannot get a picture of it in full view.

He watches it make landfall in San Francisco bay, watches, in terrifying first person point of view as the chopper flies a bit too close, and sees a massive clawed appendage reach up, too fast, impossibly fast for a creature that size, and... and swat the chopper out of the air like nothing. Less than a fly, less than anything, just gone, in less than a moment.  
The feed goes dark the second the massive claw slams into the chopper, and after a few seconds of staticky silence, it switches to a truly stunned news anchor. The man can only stare blankly for a few minutes, before someone gets his attention and he shakily begins to speak.

 _“The- several- several hours ago an object of some sort was sighted from a fishing trawler in the Pacific, moving eastward. Shortly afterwards a 7.1 Earthquake rocked the city and surrounding areas. Moments later, what you just saw emerged from the water and tore down the Golden Gate Bridge. It is unsure if the initial reports indicate a source of origin of this animal, but so far it is the only explanation we have as to where it might have come from. It is a massive... creature, currently estimated somewhere between 200 and 300 feet tall, some sort of reptilian or amphibious beast unlike anything we've ever seen before. It came out from the ocean little more than thirty minutes ago, and it has already done... irreparable damage to the San Francisco area... It's unlike... it's really imposible to describe it-_  

Inset, just beside the anchor’s head came new video feed. People fleeing in droves, lights flashing, planes soaring overhead.  
The creature was dragging itself from the water, leaving a trail of iridescent blue oil in its wake, crushing buildings beneath its massive claws. Whoever the poor soul was taping the scene was suddenly surrounding by a cloud of dust, and the feed shut off.  
Hermann hoped, desperately, that the person filming had found shelter.

 _“It’s impossible...”_ the anchor was repeating. _“Impossible to describe, it’s no animal that ever... it’s some kind of trespasser in our world.”_

It had been a poetic and bizarre way of explaining the creature, but the name had stuck and it had stuck fast. Trespasser, the beast that levelled three cities and killed tens of thousands of people, that could only be taken down by nuking Oakland.

And when it was over, the world began to move on. Memorialize and immortalize. Mourn and remember. Wars were stopped, national dislike paused in the wake of a tragedy and event that just... Made no sense and was incredibly bizarre. Where had it come from? They knew less about the oceans than anything else on or off the planet but... something like that? Just waltzing out from the depths like it did? It doesn't sit right with Hermann, but he talks himself into believing that no other creature that size could exist on a planet like this. It just couldn't.

It’s over, he thinks. The odds of another thing like that existing beneath the ocean... Impossible.

  
\-----

  
Five months later, a second creature, now called a Kaiju, hits Manila. It takes two bombs to take it out this time. The city is forever changed, it will be years before they can ever live there again.

Surely, he thinks, surely it cannot happen again. But five months it’s been, almost to the day, and Hermann Gottlieb knows a pattern beginning when he sees one. He studies the seismic activity preceding each event, looks at patterns from months in advance, stares for long stretches of time at documents and reports. He knows patterns, yes, he knows odds. He simply... wants to believe that it’s not so.

Out of nerves, he makes a prediction.

He wakes up on the day, and there is no Kaiju attack. Five months later, nothing.

He breathes an amazing sigh of relief, and for three months he feels the world is finally out of hot water, so to speak.

But three months later he turns on the news, and eight months after the attack on Manila, to the very day, another Kaiju makes landfall in Cabo San Lucas.

He hates that he is right, but a third event means he cannot ignore what he sees happening around him. He submits a report on his findings to his father, explains the pattern he predicts will begin to emerge. It is the first time that his father looks at his numbers and agrees. He sends it up the chain and the both of them are immediately drafted to the newly christened Pan Pacific Defense Corps. Twenty-one nations, coming together to combat what the world now knows to be not a one off event. He joinst the Jaeger academy, is shuttled around the world to Kodiak Island, in Alaska, where he is colder than he has ever been, colder even than in Cambridge. He will be learning about the Kaiju, about what they are calling the Breach, about something called the Jaeger program. It is 2015 and he has dropped his entire projected future at the drop of a hat to leap into something that has barely been formed in the haste to defend.

To do more than defend.

The pattern would continue, and they would fight it, and Hermann Gottlieb is going to fight it the only way he knows how.

He is twenty-five years old.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”  
> ― G.K. Chesterton

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About Vanessa: We basically know nothing about Vanessa. We know she’s his wife and we know she’s pregnant aaannnddd well that’s about it. So I sort of built her up based on a series of headcanons that I really enjoyed, and left her appearance mostly up to interpretation with a few small hints about her. At the end of the day I wanted her to be someone who would temper Hermann, not so much change him, but give him someone who completely and without question accepts and cares about him, while at the same time helping him take leaps of faith instead of worrying about the odds of a situation. She became a Marine Biologist so I could explore some ideas of what the Kaijus presence would do to our oceans.

It is 2015 and he has just been introduced to Doctor Newton Geiszler, who has recently joined the Jaeger academy and is already the foremost expert on Kaiju anatomy.  They are to be roommates in the science wing at the Jaeger Program base in Alaska due to an unfortunate twist of alphabetical surname assignments.

They hate each other.

They share workspace and they share a room and Newton plays synthesized electronic NOISE from speakers he plugs into his laptop, he dances while he works, he talks out loud to himself and refuses to listen to feedback from Hermann on the very things he says out loud. He drums on desktops and steals Hermann’s chalk, and when Newt gets his hands on a formaldehyde tube of what are apparently Kaiju arteries, or at least the equivalent of, it’s a daily battle to keep the slimy things off his desk, let alone his side of the room. One day he blares a song from some Broadway hit and bounces around the room mouthing the words, finally culminating him shouting ‘BLONDE!’ at Hermann, only for them to end in a shouting match in their native German that just about levels the base and sends it crashing into the icy waters around Kodiak Island.* The fight itself leaves him red in the face and ears and flustered beyond all reason

He lasts two weeks before the music is so irritating and the hyperactive back and forth makes him beg for some kind of reassignment of quarters, he can’t get any work done, the man is impossible. After needling and begging and sending what must have been fifty well-worded complaints about Newton’s incessant racket making and childish disposition, they tell him there is no available bunk switch. So Hermann ends up taking quick naps wherever he can get them that isn’t his room. He works long hours writing code segments in the lab, learning the basics and more of the proposed Jaeger Project, and has loud debates with his father over the value of implementing Artificial Intelligence programs in the suggested Jaeger. The rift between him and his father grows vast and possibly unfixable, but still he writes an AI, he codes the programming for the first generation of Jaegers, he is clapped on the shoulder by dozens of people every time he makes a breakthrough. His father's disdain for his belief cannot penetrate the joy at being told well done.

He stays in the lab later than everyone else, and while they think he never sleeps, that he is so serious and always working, what he’s really doing is catching up on his sleep. Newton makes noises in his sleep, tosses and turns and it’s impossible for Hermann to wake up even remotely well rested in the morning. So he finds the comfiest chair in the break lounge or in the lab, sleeps beside a chalkboard and tries not to let the cold seep into his bones.

That is how he meets Vanessa. 

She is a Marine Biologist that works with Newton Geiszler, and he has seen her around the lab but their areas of expertise do not quite mean they meet very often. She is the one who made people realize just how brutally toxic Kaiju blood was and is the one whose fingertips are still stained a pale blue from her work. (“It’s not toxic, not anymore, I mean,” she tells him. “It’s just stained. Dyed, almost. It’s faded a lot since I first touched it, and I hope it continues to do so.” she grins and wiggles her fingers at him, and he cannot help but smile and jerk backwards a little.)

It is late in the night and he has managed to fall asleep sitting straight up in the break lounge, legs propped up on the coffee table to get comfortable. The light blinks on and he hears a door open, and he is jarred awake by the sight of a young woman his age standing at the door.

It is a bit awkward, but the long and short of it is that her roommate brought one of the soldiers over into the room that night without telling her. She’s been wandering the hangar bays and non restricted areas since and, deciding she’s not about to get back into her room, came here to try and catch some shut eye.

“What about you?” she asks, and sits down next to him without an invitation.

“I am Doctor Geiszlers’ roommate.” he declares, looking weary. 

“Oh you poor bastard, he’s a handful, isn’t he? Has he showed you that damn tattoo of his?” 

From there it evolves, a companionship the likes of which he’s never had before. Easy discussion about chemistry and physics and about life. She loves poetry and keeps mint candies on her person at all time, adores the oceans and the natural world. As the weeks roll by they begin exchanging languages, he teaches her some German, she imparts on him her Spanish. (“Born in America, but my mother and father were from Belize.”)

It is a curious mix of dialects they begin speaking to each other, they are both fast learners and before they know it they switch smoothly between languages like water through a sieve.

She is about two inches taller than he is, but she never makes him feel small. Quite the contrary, in fact.

As it happens they never get a chance to put his AI through the Turing test, though he thinks about it often. He never gets the chance because in April, a Kaiju makes landfall in Vancouver, Karloff they’re calling it, and they deploy Brawler Yukon before they have had the chance to give it a field test.

They already lost Captain Adam Casey to the stress of the pons, it hasn’t been tested with two, though in theory he knows it should work. There is so much unknown, even though they’ve accomplished so much since they were nuking Scissure in Sydney.

He does not like theory, he likes odds that are in their favor. But, it works. It works and he is... happy. So happy. His code worked, his program worked, and while his father never quite speaks to him the same way, it is a small price to pay for doing what he always said he would. Of course there is no way to prove his AI would prove the Turing test, but Brawler Yukon succeeded, the odds are-

“You’re proven nothing, Hermann. You never will.” his father tells him.

And he feels very much like the six year old boy whose tower had been destroyed.

But he is in his twenties and he is adult enough to not stomp the floor and say ‘I hate you father, I hate you!’ so instead he turns to the side and tightens his jaw, clenches the head of his cane and says nothing.

From behind him, though, he hears a woman’s voice speak up.

“That’s terrible to say. Hermann did amazing work on that Jaeger, he’s gone above and beyond to make that thing work the way it does. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

His father goes beet red, and suddenly Vanessa has hooked her arm with his and they are striding out of the room to celebrate a legitimate victory.

Celebrating involves the only flavor ice cream from the mess hall, chocolate, sitting in her dorm room and venting about all the things his father told him he couldn’t do, shouldn’t do. He tells her about the book on biplanes and his fall and how his little brother Bastien is learning to fly commercial airlines. He grips the ice cream spoon and and stares at the slowly melting concoction, and he’s not sure what he’s waiting to happen. Somewhere he thinks she will tell him what they all told him, to get over it, that life is like that sometimes and he should get used to it.

But no, no she doesn’t do that. She sits beside him and she curls her fingers around his palm and she tells him that his father is wrong and has always been wrong. She squeezes his hand and she smiles at him, honest and kind and all the things he ever wanted to see sent his way. It makes him feel taller than he’s ever felt in his life.

“Do you really believe that?” he asks.

“More than anything. You’re a brilliant person, Hermann. If you’re father can’t see that... Then I feel sorry for him.”

He doesn’t know what to say, he really doesn’t. Hermann has never been one to be at a loss for words, not really. He almost always knows the answer, and when he doesn’t, he finds the answer. He gapes for a moment, and finally manages to choke out words that do not nearly meet the way he feels about her.

“You are the most remarkable person I have ever met.”

 

\-----

 

It is early in 2016 and they announce that more Shatterdomes are being built. Hong Kong has been established for some time, but Lima and Anchorage now have construction underway. People are getting new assignments, the Jaeger program is splitting up, builders and soldiers and engineers are heading out. Newton Geiszler and a large portion of biologists are being sent to Anchorage, where the corpse of Karloff, some of it anyway, is being kept on ice. Hermann is being sent to Lima, to assist in the construction of more Jaegers, pass on and improve the coding and computers processes that the massive mechs need.

For the first few days of the announcement he is thrilled, not only will be he away from Newton Geiszler and his horrible music, but he will also be split from his father, who is going to Hong Kong to assist in the more hands on technical aspects of Jaeger design. But his joy is brief, when he discovers that Vanessa is going with Newton Geiszler to Anchorage to study the toxic effects of Kaiju Blue on the ocean.

They still talk, they still take long, almost adventurous walks out on chilly Kodiak island where the base is located, but the day is fast approaching when he very possibly might not ever see her again. He tells her nothing about how he... feels, he doesn’t want to... It doesn’t matter. The odds are against him, is what they are, and odds make sense, odds are comforting. He doesn’t think he’d quite be able to recover from rejection the way he has in the past when it comes to her.

So the days pass and towards the end of January the groups of scientists and engineers start being shuttled out of the Shatterdome and to their respective stations around the globe. He doesn’t say goodbye to Newton Geiszler, whose left arm is almost entire covered in tattoos now, he does exchange obligatory familial words with his father, however, before he catches his boat off the island and to the airport with the rest of his team. Hermann finds Vanessa, typing away at a computer in the lab, luminescent blue tubes half packed away in an airtight hazardous materials case.

It is... strange. He’s never had an issue with goodbye. Hermann generally enjoys getting away from people, be it family or otherwise. He’s experiencing a lot of uncertainties with Vanessa, a lot of firsts and a lot of... very strange odds.

They go through the usual steps of a goodbye, the words and platitudes that whirl together too swiftly for his taste.

“It’s been wonderful working with you,”

“The same goes for you, Hermann! Thank you for teaching me German,”

“Same to you with the Spanish. Godspeed dealing with Newton in Anchorage.” 

“I’m sure he’ll be fine, the cold will slow him down.” 

Easy chuckles. “I’m sure it will, stay warm yourself, won’t you?” 

“I will, and you try to enjoy Lima.” 

“I will give it my level best... Goodbye then, Vanessa.” 

She leans forward and hugs him, wraps her arms around his shoulders and squeezes tight, and he can smell mint and something in her perfume that makes him think of the ocean.

“Goodbye, Hermann.” 

“I’ll miss you.” 

His voice does something on that sentence, and he immediately wishes he didn’t say it. Hermann doesn’t miss people, he’s never missed people, he’s made it something of a life’s mission to get away from people. People disappoint, people lie, people betray. 

But Vanessa is not people.

Vanessa pulls him even closer and kisses him like he’s never been kissed, and tells him he’d better keep in contact before gathering up her test tubes and her laptop and scurrying from the lab.

He is twenty-six years old.

 

\-----

 

He spends a year and change in Lima, coding Jaegers and Artificial Intelligence programs, but he gains an interest in the breach, the rift at the bottom of the Pacific where the Kaiju emerge. So little is known, so much is as of yet unexplained. He reads every report, every experience, every bit of information they have on it, and it still explains nothing. High energy readings, traces of radiation... The Kaiju aren’t coming from a crack in the ocean floor, they are coming from... something else.

He writes a report and a proposal and within a few months he gets sent out on an aircraft carrier that has had a section of it converted into a lab.

He spends weeks on that boat, getting seasick and studying graphs and energy readings.  It is terribly dangerous work, hovering this close to the breach, and the soldiers and other scientists are fretting about sudden Kaiju attacks. But Hermann knows his numbers, and his numbers are never wrong, and they are not due for a Kaiju attack. (Of course he’s still following the pattern, patterns don’t end unless interrupted, and learning about the breach is the best way to interrupt the pattern. Simple logic.)

They return to shore several times, and only once is it because of a Kaiju attack, one that he tells them should be happening any day now. They retreat and make contact with the PPDC HQ, who monitor the area closely for a total of four grueling days. On the fourth day, a Kaiju emerges from the breach and is taken out in record time by Diablo Intercept and Tacit Ronin.  

The corpse of the behemoth is taken to Anchorage for study, and when they return to the area near the breach they find that the surface of the water is covered in dead wildlife. Deep sea fish, sharks he’s never seen before, it is a graveyard of ocean life.

They send this development up the chain of command, and not a day later a handful of scientists arrive via chopper on the carrier.

He has had what can only be described as a long distance relationship with Vanessa for a year now, hesitantly explored with video chats and thousands of emails. But she didn’t tell him that she would be arriving with a contingency of fellow Marine Biologists. He meets her on the deck and it’s...

He hates that she leaves him without words.

But he doesn’t really care because he’s thrilled to be working beside her again. They bounce ideas off one another and spend long hours talking. Work gets done, and it gets done well, and he... Is happy.

One night, alone in the lab, he’s writing the day’s reports and she’s hunched over a sample of blue tinged flesh under a microscope and she starts crying. He sits with her for a long time and she explains that the flesh of the dead animals is decaying. Whatever killed the fish isn’t the problem, she explains, they died of suffocation, she says, probably from a whirlpool effect made by the massive creatures emerging from seemingly nowhere. It’s the fact that post-mortem the animals literally begin to liquefy. The energy the Breach gives off isn’t deadly, but it affects dead flesh in the same way that Kaiju Blue affects dead flesh. Speeded putrefaction and liquefaction, jumping stages of decay too quickly to be anything natural.**

She tells him her parents died in the K-Day attack on San Francisco. Their bodies were never recovered, and she tells him she is terrified that this is what happened to them. She’s suspected this for years, she’s been studying what Kaiju physiology does to flesh since K-Day, but this confirms it, really confirms it.

“They died, Hermann, and there was nothing to bury.” she says, and he holds her hands and notices, distantly, that the blue has faded completely from her fingertips.

He doesn’t know what to tell her, once more struck into silence. So, he pulls her to him and they clean up, and he brings her to his room. Nothing happens, they just sleep, and he hopes it helps. Before her breathing evens out, before he drifts into sleep, he tells her that maybe there’s nothing to bury, but there is definitely something to avenge, and every little thing they discover about the Kaiju, about the Breach... It is a chink in those creatures armor.

Below them, beyond the bottom of the ocean, something lurks. And on the ship, far above, they drift.

 

\-----

 

In 2019 a pair of Physicists from India propose that the Breach is actually an opening from another world, another universe, they say. They show countless streams of energy signatures and seismic activity, light patterns, radio waves, calculations that Hermann spends hours pouring over once he gets the incredibly thick information packet delivered to his desk.

From what they propose, a model is built of what comes to be called the Throat. A long tunnel they say leads into another planet, perhaps another universe altogether.

Fantastical, yes, but then again so are the skyscraper sized monsters that periodically emerge from the ocean to rain hell and destruction upon the planet. The math holds up, and he cannot dispute that. Neither, it seems, can the PPDC.

So they put eyes on the Breach, they station a three Jaeger team there round the clock, and when it finally happens... They get their first physical view of the Breach. Onboard cameras in the Jaegers watch it split open and a Kaiju they call Clawhook slithers its way from the shining portal and into the water. And it’s definitely a portal, there’s no question now that it isn’t a portal. One Jaeger is deployed to try and bomb the breach while the other two take care of Clawhook.

What happens next is a massacre, two Jaegers are destroyed and one crippled beyond repair. They lose four pilots and the other two may never pilot again. The bombs crash through the portal and hit the ocean floor, but nothing else.

Clawhook makes its way to Hawaii, where young rangers Yancy and Raleigh Becket take the creature down in the Jaeger Gipsy Danger.

Trying to destroy the Breach, they decide, is a losing battle.

They do not try again.

 

\-----

 

The next couple of years are a series of different stations, sometimes far from Vanessa, sometimes stiflingly close to Newton Geiszler. Despite the seething distaste he has for the other man- who has more tattoos now than Hermann is willing to count- they work amazing well together. Hermann’s growing understanding of the Breach and Newton’s continued progress in pinpointing weaknesses of Kaiju mean they are often shoved together in a lab and told to do things. It’s 2020 and he has been to every Shatterdome, met countless lab techs, engineers, Rangers, and very few of them have stuck in his memory.

In February, he is stationed at Anchorage, long-distance once again from Vanessa, but also long-distance from Newton Geiszler. Herman doesn’t mind alone, but now that he’s spent long mornings in a small apartment with Vanessa...

It’s very cold in Anchorage.

He dreams of hazy early mornings, rain on the windows, egg on toast and cups of hot tea, Vanessa leaning over his shoulder to point at a computer screen, still in pyjamas with her long hair down and brushing the back of his neck. He dreams about soft words and about asking her a question, but even so many years later, even when he feels comfortable and assured of how much he loves her... He fears the odds she will respond negatively.

Some would say 50/50 are pretty good odds, but they are not good enough for Hermann Gottlieb. He’d much prefer a 60/40 split in his favor, so he says nothing and continues trying to make the math work out in his favor.

But while most things he can apply math to, it is not his way to understand that math cannot solve all matters.

So he holds off on asking that question.

 

\-----

 

It is 2020 and he’s sharing a lab with Newton Geiszler again. The man has somehow managed to become even MORE insufferable. He talks out loud and blares his loud music and Hermann is developing a twitch in his jaw the likes of which has never been seen before. At least they aren’t sharing a room this time around, just a workspace.

A workspace he often spends ten hour days in.

There is no real 9 to 5 in the PPDC, you work until you figure something out, or at least until you’re about to pass out. Newton comes into the lab every morning pouring a Five Hour Energy shot into his mug of coffee, and he’s wired like mad for the majority of the day. Hermann has tried to tell him thousands of times that if he drinks too much of that, his heart will probably explode in on itself. But Newton doesn’t take well to being mothered and nagged at, so he calls Hermann a worrywort.

“It’ll be your own fault when you have a stroke from that much concentrated caffeine!”

“I know what my body can handle, Hermann!”

“How many times have I asked you-”

  
“-to call me Doctor that is my title and I am not so aloof with it as you!”

“To call you Doctor that is your title and you are not so aloof with it as me!”

 

Hermann sniffs. “You’re insufferable.”

“And you need to pick that wedgie out dude, maybe stop wearing so much wool. I could light a match on that sweater you’ve got on.”

“Hrmph!” he turns on his heel and returns to his desk, lips shut tight.

For about three minutes the room is blessedly quiet.

“Oh come on, Hermann, un-hunch your shoulders. You look like Quasimodo.”

If anything else, Hermann hunches over his work even further at the words that break the silence. He can hear a tapping from behind him. In his minds eye he can see Newt tapping a pencil against a glass jar that holds a piece of a Kaiju cornea. (From Clawhook’s right secondary eye structure, he knew.)

“Nothing to say? Come on, I gotta get my brain moving here.”

He wants to say something along the lines of his brain never stops moving, it is always moving and annoying and irritating. But Hermann holds his tongue and continues typing calculations into a simulation about the Breach and what he believes to be beneath the Breach. At the moment, Newton is turning into an even smaller child than he usually is, acting quite a bit like Bastien did when he was young, if Hermann recalls correctly. (And he does.) A tiny, annoying puppy who desperately craves attention, any attention, even negative attention. Wanting to be included and involved in the lives of everyone around him, and getting whiny when they didn’t.

At least Newton wouldn’t pee on the carpet if he got too excited.

He doesn't think so, anyway.

“Heeeerrrmaaannnnnn...”

Hermann straightens up, but does not turn around, only types and types and the code and the equations are coming so easily all of a sudden. A flowing stream of thought brought on by the irritant behind him, numbers and letters and a stream of information being input into the computer. He can hear tapping from a pencil on various surfaces, changing location as Newton strolls around the room, tapping and prodding and talking out loud to Hermann about things that Hermann is pointedly ignoring. From a radio in the corner, Hermann can hear someone crooning about flames growing higher, but he does not have the musical knowledge to pinpoint who or what is being puked into the air and reaching his ears.

He types and types and types and-

“Hermann! Heeeeermaaannn~ Hermann the German- is this your girlfriend? Or wife? I don’t see a wedding ring on you. Hey I’ve worked with her-”

He’s across the room faster than he has ever moved in his life, fueled by fury over an ancient schoolyard nickname and the frantic desire to not let Newton see any part of his personal life. Not the parts that matter, not the parts that make the world worth turning.

He snatches the small framed picture of Vanessa, (She’s sitting on the edge of an Aircraft carrier, sun in her hair, smiling, from the months they spent studying the area around the Breach.)  and clutches it to his chest with one hand.

“First of all, you are never to call me that again, ever. And secondly, if you ever lay a finger on the things on my desk again, I will personally forego all formal complaints and force you out of this lab and out of PPDC for the rest of your days. I don’t care how I have to do it, but believe me I will.”

And for the first time in his life, perhaps, Newton has nothing to say. He holds up his hands, strides back over to the other side of the lab and starts puttering away at a scale model of what he believes a Kaiju colon looks like, adding small pins to indicate weaknesses.

Hermann breathes hard, looks at the photo, puts it in the drawer of his desk, and takes several calming breaths. Inhale and exhale. Maybe he overreacted, but it doesn’t matter. His life is private, the nickname set him off... It doesn’t matter. Within the hour the music is blaring again, Newton is rambling once more, and Hermann is three paragraphs into a fresh formal complaint. Still... The incident sits with Hermann and in the morning he draws a line down the middle of the lab and demands Newton never cross to his side. Newton doesn’t listen and he crosses the line all the bloody time, but he never again goes near Hermann’s desk, so... He decides he can live with that. Begrudgingly, anyway.

He still lodges a complaint with HR when he finds sticky blue entrails on his chalkboard, however.

It is the year he draws a clearly defined line between his and Newton Geiszler's side of the room.

It is also the year they lose Gipsy Danger.

And the year the funding begins to get cut.

And the year they decide to build the wall.

Deathly blows to the Jaeger Program and to the PPDC, one after another. It leaves him reeling somewhat. Long hours in a lab, utilizing as much of what he has as possible, because the world of a scientist can be fickle. He could be pulled from his work any day now, and it takes a terrible toll on him. His limp grows worse with fatigue, he becomes weary and tired, and he relishes in returning home to Vanessa, to cups of tea and good company and hands that lace just right with his. They stop talking about work when they get home, though, because her research is just as taxing as his, maybe even more so given how much she loves the ocean and loves the creatures within it. She brings home sad little preserved fish that have become phosphorescent and died after ingesting or coming in contact with Kaiju Blue. Their gills leak and turn the preserving fluid a dingy blue, and one day she comes home with a LIVING Clownfish in a tank.

The orange that once graced it, the colors that gave it it’s silly name, have turned a radioactive shade of blue.

She shakes her head, and a few days later the animal dies. When she is hunched over her work computer later, he can hear her mumbling about her hope that the long term effects do not destroy the wildlife completely.

That is a night that he pulls her from the work and brings her to bed, because sometimes a distraction is the only thing that can help.

That is the year that decides on a future where he throws in his lot with Stacker Pentecost and abandons his father at the research center in Cambridge, because they fought so much about the damn wall that Hermann brought up old resentments and his father brought up old lectures. The PPDC is crumbling and researchers and scientists are slowly being pulled and sent back to what they were doing beforehand, or to new projects that don’t involve the Jaeger program. He tells his father, to Lars’ face, that is a damn fool who cannot see the numbers, the cold facts in front of his own eyes.

Hermann Gottlieb slams the door behind him as he leaves his father's office, and while he doesn’t enjoy pulling away from funding and beautifully maintained facilities, he knows it is the right thing to do. The numbers don’t lie, the attacks are getting worse and hiding behind a wall will not fix things. It won’t even help things. It’ll be nothing but another thing for the Kaijus to smash.

So he leaves his father behind, and decides to hang onto the Jaeger program for as long as he possibly can.

It is also the year that Vanessa sits him down, takes his hand, and asks him to marry her.

There was, of course, no question on the odds of his answer.

 

\-----

 

It is August of 2021, and it is his wedding day.

It is a small event, but they travel to California to have it. Her parents are gone, and it’s a strangely sentimental thing, but he does it anyway. As well, she has no one to walk her down the aisle, and in a fit of romance, Hermann suggests he walk her down.

“You’re going into this with me, we might as well walk it together.” he says, and they break a lot of traditions in this way but it doesn’t matter. They find a stretch of beach untouched by Kaiju claws and say their vows, and it’s... it’s more than he can ever quite explain. He did not really ever think he would reach this point. The odds were against him, he felt. Dietrich is his best man and Vanessa’s best friend stands as her maid of honor. Hermann has only Bastien as his groomsman and in a show of solidarity, Vanessa picks her cousin as a lone bridesmaid.

He wears a well tailored suit and she wears a flowing white sundress, and the rings are simple but lovely. She tears up and he holds her hands, and then he gets choked up and turns bright red and Vanessa squeezes his palms to reassure him. It is quiet and intimate and very soft. The ocean is their wedding song.

The reception is also tiny, as neither have very huge families. An uncle and aunt from her side, plus her younger brother. Hermann’s brothers and sister and their respective families, a handful of friends and Newton Geiszler, who was only invited because he knows both of them and found out through Tendo Choi. Vanessa likes him well enough and figured they’d worked together long enough that he counted as a good friend, despite Hermann’s feelings on the subject. Along with those come quite a few friends of Vanessa, and all together it means the reception ends up rather rowdy. Newton catches the bouquet, of all people, and Hermann flushes bright red as he removes the garter from Vanessa’s leg and tosses it into the crowd. (“Hermann I can’t believe you did that!” “I most certainly didn’t want to, they started chanting.” “I’ll make it up to you later, darling.” “You don’t have to.” “Hermann Gottlieb, did you enjoy that a little bit?” “Why Vanessa Gottlieb, how could you possibly suggest such a thing?” )

His father is there, so is his mother, he says little to the former and hugs his mother tightly.

Curiously enough, it is a remarkable wedding. The best, in fact. The only one he’d ever want.

He is 31 years old.

 

\-----

 

It is 2022 and he has been removed from the Jaeger Program. After much discussion with Vanessa, they move to a suitable home near Portsmouth where a facility cropped up in 2019 to study the effects of Kaiju Blue on marine life. He commutes to London to teach at University, and while it’s a long commute, he doesn’t mind the drive. He continues to study the Breach, even if he’s very far away from it now. Predicts Kaiju attacks with remarkable accuracy, sends email after email with findings to his remaining contacts in the PPDC, but nobody is really listening anymore. It is hard but... He enjoys it, in a way. Loves it, even, being able to come home and talk about the day, hear about Vanessa’s work, talk about his students. Cups of tea and taking walks and... He can never quite grow content.

It’s not even that he ISN’T content, because he is. He loves this life, it is a wonderful life. It’s the life he wants, but the math doesn’t lie. The patterns do not lie. The odds do not lie.

The Kaiju are increasing, and one day he realizes that it’s in a pattern he knows all too well.  The Kaiju are coming in the Fibonacci sequence, the pattern was in front of his face for years but it was so damn simple! So bloody simple why would he notice it?

He sends this in, but there’s so few people left to listen, so few who CARE.

But he gets an email from Stacker Pentecost.

_Doctor Gottlieb,_

_I've been reviewing your frequent data packages over the last several months, and have requested you be reinstated in the Pan Pacific Defense Corps. Any data you have is to be handed in to me upon your arrival, should you accept, at the Hong Kong Shatterdome._

_I’m putting something together, and we need you._

_Marshal Stacker Pentecost_   
_PPDC_

So he gives him everything.

 

\-----

 

It is 2024, and he has been divvying his time up between Portsmouth with Vanessa, and Hong Kong with Newton Geiszler in a lab.  In 2022 he was re-recruited into the PPDC, requested personally by Marshal Stacker Pentecost, and while the funding from the PPDC’s bureaucratic side dried up months ago they are still in business.  

He is sharing a lab with Newton again, the man is somehow sleeping even less than he used to.

Conditions are not optimal, they are working with seriously outdated equipment, but it’s all they have. Everyone is aware of what is riding on them and this plan of theirs. Drop a nuke into the Breach... The missiles from years ago didn’t work, but with the energy of a thermonuclear bomb on their side, Newton and Hermann predict that there is a very high probability that they can permanently collapse the Breach. They are simply waiting for the right moment to go for it, for the Breach to be open long enough, and with his projected model of Kaiju attacks, and his growing belief at the possibility of a double event... It could be happening incredibly soon. They have Cherno Alpha, Crimson Typhoon, a still-being-repaired Gipsy Danger, and probably will have Striker Eureka on their side very soon. Jaegers are being retired, and the Hong Kong Shatterdome is the only one working independently of the PPDC. Options are slim for the pilots that remain.

Desperate is the word for what they are. Low on funds, low on Jaegers, low on hope. But the fight’s not over, Stacker Pentecost has made very sure of that.

He spends months away from Vanessa and it takes it’s toll on him. He wishes she could come work in the Shatterdome with him, but her own work is very important. Pentecost’s plan may save the world, but a very poor world it would be if the ocean was a husk of it’s former self. He is able to return for several weeks in August, however, and it’s... refreshing. They go for long walks in the English countryside, visit museums, keep the world at bay for a little while. They leave work at work and for a while... They can pretend that there are no Kaiju.

On their anniversary, they go to the beach, have dinner at a nice restaurant, and she pulls him into their bedroom with an urgency and a grin on her face that has the ability to turn him into a completely different person.

It’s a good day. A well needed reprieve from what Stacker keeps calling the last days of war.

The Marshal allows him leave to stay home for a few extra weeks but in September he’s back on a plane to Hong Kong. He says goodbye to Vanessa at the airport and says hello to Newton at the Shatterdome.

In mid-October, he gets a call from Vanessa. In the small screen of his laptop, her face is concerned, and he’s suddenly terrified. Has something terrible happened? Should he go home? Would Stacker allow him? What she tells him is the last thing he expects.

“I’m pregnant.”

He’s not sure what face he makes, but it makes Vanessa laugh and start tearing up a bit.

“P-pregnant? Actually- actually pregnant?”

She nods, torn between joy and worry- worry. She’s worried of what he’ll think, of his reaction.

He’s not sure. They’d talked about children, and he’d said every time he wasn’t 100% sure. He didn’t think he’d be a very good father, was... was actually a bit terrified at the prospect. He’d never been against it, just scared.

“Hermann?”

“I-I’m sorry, I’m just... surprised, I didn’t expect... You had me worried for a moment! This is wonderful, Vanessa, it really is I... Really?”

She’s laughing now, looking relieved, and nods.

“When- how far along?”

“Our Anniversary,” she says, looking a bit sultry in the screen, and Hermann laughs gently. “Only about five weeks, but... Pretty solidly pregnant, and all. You are happy?”

“Vanessa this is- well I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t absolutely terrified, but I am happy. I am. Are you?”

“I am! And I’m really excited, I just- I know you’ve always been a bit unsure...”

“Well, you know me best. You’ve had to take the lead for a lot of things I couldn’t get the courage to do on my own,” he holds up his finger with the wedding ring and she laughs.

“You had a ring in your pocket when I asked you.”

“I did... So yes, I’m terrified, but I am thrilled, I really am. A baby...”

And he is, when he gets over the shock, happy! A baby. A daughter or son. A few hours later, when he’s off the line with Vanessa and settling into bed for the night, he starts thinking about how he won’t be his father. He’ll let his child do and be anything they want, anything they feel. There will be no conditions, no practicality. If his child wants to do something, wants to be something, Hermann will help them be it. He can teach them things and read to them and tell them stories. He’s excited, for a while, incredibly excited about the prospect of a child of his own, laying in bed and thinking about all the things that come with raising a child.

But the clock ticks and ticks and the hour grows ever later, and he cannot sleep. The numbers from the digital clock on his nightstand float away and become the numbers on a chalkboard, numbers that mean terrible things are very near on the horizon.

How can be bring a child into a world like this?

Will he ever even get the chance to meet him, or her? How should he think about them?

Hermann realizes that he is on the front lines, that the Shatterdome is the only line of defense against the Kaiju threat.

Suddenly, Hermann is wracked with terror. If he cannot stop the Kaiju threat, then nothing will be in the way to stop them from killing- no no no stop. Stop.

He pulls himself out of bed, gets dressed, and hurries to the lab on no sleep. He works all night, well into the early hours, until most of his massive chalkboard is filled in and he has a holographic model of the throat, and both openings of the Breach sitting at his station.

The sun has already risen, the Shatterdome is already awake when Newton arrives in the lab, staving off a yawn and carrying four cups of coffee from the cafeteria. Hermann is asleep over his work station, a slowly rotating model in front of him, a piece of chalk clutched between his fingers.

He is startled awake by Newton Geiszler prodding his shoulder, and Hermann jumps in his seat, re-adjusting his glasses and staring up at his colleague, who lifts an eyebrow.

“Have you been in here all night?”

“I- yes, yes I had work to do.”

“You told me last night you’d finished everything for the day.”

“I- I remembered more that needed to get done.”

Newton stares at him. “Dude, are you okay? You look like death warmed over, moreso than usual.”

Hermann huffs and puffs but cannot quite get any words out. Instead he gestures at one of Newton’s coffee cups, and the tattooed man passes him one, looking a bit sad to be rid of one of the mugs. Newton looks uncomfortable.

“You uh... You wanna.. talk about it?”

No, he doesn’t, but Hermann cannot talk to Vanessa about this. He doesn’t feel he can, anyway, and he isn’t talking to his father, and his mother would just get upset, and his siblings are so far inland they wouldn’t understand.

So he takes a steadying sip of the coffee, filled with too much sugar and milk for his taste but enough to get him talking right. “Vanessa is pregnant,” he mutters.

“Oh. Is that a ‘hell yes’ or an ‘oh no’ thing?”

Hermann gives a bit of a half shrug. “Should be the former, would prefer it to be the former... This isn’t exactly the... right world to bring a child into, after all...”

It’s the most painfully awkward conversation he has ever had in his life. Possibly equally for Newton. Both of them sort of stay where they are, looking anywhere other than at each other, and it’s impossible to tell what’s going on in either of their heads. It’s the most Hermann has ever revealed about his personal life since Newton was at his wedding, and Newton spent that whole affair talking with a handful of Vanessa’s college friends about the life cycle of an Octopus.

Miracle of miracles, Newton actually gives him a piece of helpful advice.

“Well I... I don’t really have uh, the experience in the matter but... I know Tendo uh, he’s got a kid, ‘bout six months old now. Maybe uh, maybe you could... I dunno, talk to him about it?”

Hermann nods, clearing his throat. “That... that might be a good idea, yes.”

“And hey, man-” Newton starts backing up towards his side of the lab, seemingly desperate to get away from the situation, probably regretting his inquisitive nature. “-gotta have a world after we save it, right?”

Hermann nods, thinking on that.

It’s the closest to a meaningful conversation he’s ever had with Newton, and... it helps, oddly enough. He doesn’t end up going to speak to Tendo Choi, but he does start thinking, for the first time in his life, of what life will be like after the Kaiju war. Because it has to come to end, it has to.

There are too many good things the future might hold for the war to last forever.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *- Yes Newt was singing Wicked. His parents were artsy, I’m sure he grew up with some Broadway.  
> **- This is something I kinda thought about on my own, based on the seas of genetic material they describe in the novelization. In the book it explains that Kaiju that don’t quite make the cut are broken down and remade, re-cloned until they meet the standards to send through the Breach. The idea being that the Kaiju Blue helps in breaking down dead flesh for repurposing faster than it usually would. (This is kinda backed up by how quickly the Kaiju are sort of shown to start decaying.)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.”  
> ― Joseph Heller

October is a rough month for the Hong Kong Shatterdome. Anchorage shuts down and Gipsy Danger is brought, still under refits, to reside in one of the bays. In the same breath, Hong Kong’s sister facilities are shut down completely within days of each other, including the one in Lima where Hermann spent most of 2016 and 2017. Tokyo’s Dome goes dark the very next day, and in November, Panama City’s complex powers itself into disuse.

Each week that passes, more engineers and workers arrive at the Hong Kong Shatterdome,  wanting to help. Left out in the cold after their place of work was shut down, they know that Hong Kong is the only one that shows no signs, at least no immediate ones, of going belly-up. It’s hard to feed and provide for all the mouths that are showing up, but Gipsy Danger’s refits go off spectacularly. Led by Mako Mori, the old Mark III is turning into something remarkable. Hermann himself goes up to the Conn pod and oversees a good portion of the programming and rerouting of systems, and he grows rather fond of Miss Mori and her iron hold over this project. She is steadfast and never wavers, her workers respect her deeply and Hermann truly enjoys going over details of Gipsy Danger’s repairs and upgrades with her. It reminds him of the beginning, when he wasn’t so deeply involved with the Breach, reminds him of coding the first generation of Jaegers and how much fun that had been.

Someday, he thinks, he’d like to get back into this. To code and programs and an AI that verges on sentient. He would love to toe that line again.

In December, three Shatterdomes become defunct, and on the 15th they welcome Sasha and Aleksis Kaidanovsky, from Vladivostok’s Dome, into their midst. Theirs is a Jaeger that he finds his fingers itching to look at, a Mark I, Cherno Alpha. His original code runs in that Jaeger’s veins, so to speak, his work resides in its processes.

The Kaidanovskys themselves seem to notice this, because when he’s not in the lab or in Gipsy’s conn pod, he sits with them and they find things to talk about. Aleksis, he discovers, is mute, and the bond he has with his wife is so much that Hermann never has any trouble seeing both opinions and both personalities coming from the two of them. Sasha talks clearly and with authority, translating her husband’s sign language for Hermann, who starts to pick it up anyway.

Aleksis is... quiet in a way that does not have anything to do with his lack of speech. He simply prefers to listen than add in his own words, relying on facial expressions and body language to express himself. He does this, Hermann finds through Sasha explaining, because Aleksis believes the body to be the best display of who a person is.

“And I have a very big body,” he says with his hands. “very big personality.”

Sasha says something to him in Russian that Hermann doesn’t catch but it makes Aleksis’ face go ruddy and he bursts into silent laughter, leaning down to kiss his wife and nudge her good-naturedly.

Sasha is no nonsense and a force to be reckoned with, clear and intelligent and with a wicked wit that Hermann is glad he is not on the receiving end of. They tell him all about how Cherno Alpha runs, how smooth it’s always been, that the bond they have with each other would probably not be half as strong were it not for that Jaeger. Hermann gets a surge of pride at that, even though it’s more likely to be because of the Drift than his code.

He isn’t sure if they qualify as his friends, but he enjoys eating meals with them, and around Christmas time, at the same moment he’s shopping for Vanessa’s gift, he finds a pair of solid brass rings. They are wide and thick and perfectly matched, and it’s one of the few times in his life that he does something spur of the moment. Hermann buys them, and around Christmas time he passes the neatly wrapped box to the Cherno Alpha pilots, who in the same breath pass him a long package that include a thick, fur-lined parka.

They love the rings, and the coat makes him feel warm even when it’s at it’s coldest outside. He’s still not sure if this makes them FRIENDS but... he’s fairly sure they’re on their way to being such.

At the tail end of December the Sydney Shatterdome is shut down, and preparations are being made to relocate Striker Eureka to Hong Kong... Except on January 2nd a Category IV Kaiju they call Mutavore smashes through the wall and goes for the Sydney Opera House. Striker Eureka scrambles and takes it down, but it is a terribly grim reminder to everyone in Hong Kong that the wall is nothing. The wall isn’t helping, it never will.

It takes a lot of willpower to not send his father an ‘I told you so’.

He feels as if he’s aged twenty years, chugging coffee and growing desperate in their work. He’s gone over the project with Stacker a hundred times, and at this point it’s down to waiting for the right time, which should be happening any minute now and...

When the sun goes down and he retreats to his room, he cannot sleep. He’s terrified. Vanessa sends him ultrasounds and he prints them out to look at in the dead of night. He frames one and puts it next to his favorite photo of Vanessa. It’s more than his wife and child, it’s a future that doesn’t include cups of stale coffee and long hours crunching numbers in front of a chalkboard. A future that doesn’t include desperation and low resources. The world is trying to pretend that they aren’t on the brink of an apocalypse, and he knows there are riots in the streets, knows those inland don’t understand that those on the coast live in fear.

He thinks back to August of 2013, thinks about how they’ve been fighting this thing for twelve years. Thinks about how for a while it felt like they were really making a difference, but now... Things went south so fast.

He wakes up every morning and he feels like he’s scrabbling for stability on a chair in front of an old bookshelf.

On the 3rd, a few hours after Striker Eureka docks in the Shatterdome’s Jaeger bay, Raleigh Becket arrives as they’re bringing in samples from Mutavore’s carcass. Hermann watches Mako Mori eye him critically the entire time they are in the lift, watches Newton put his fool foot in his mouth, dismisses his colleague as a groupie and brings the attention away from the tattoos a bit.

How could Newton know that he’s speaking to the ranger who lost his brother to a Kaiju that Newton has emblazoned on his ribs? Newton pays attention to the Kaiju in every fight because that is his area of expertise, but Hermann sees the Jaegers. Hermann saw what Gipsy Danger looked like in Oblivion Bay, saw the ruined conn pod, saw the decimated chest, the missing arm. He sees the Jaeger and in his far far away subconscious sees a broken toy robot from his childhood. Sees a glittering defender of the people lying in ruin.

He’s worked with Newton for ten years now, and knows that Newton runs his mouth. Hermann refuses to let Newton run that mouth to a man that deserves respect, or at the very least not to be reminded of the thing that took his brother from him. So he defuses the situation by using a term he knows irritates his colleague. ‘Kaiju Groupie’ has been being whispered behind Newton’s back for ten years now, and he knows it grates on the man in a way very similar to the way ‘Hermann the German’ once grated on him.

It settles everything down, and he’s glad that nothing volatile comes of it. Even if it does mean he has to listen to a lecture from Newton about ‘Appreciation VS Obsession’ again.

On the 7th he gives his presentation on the situation in its full to Stacker Pentecost and Hercules Hansen. He humors Newton’s proposal of Drifting with a section of Kaiju brain- he has heard this a thousand times and every time it sounds crazier than it did the last time- and finds he cannot contain how pleased he feels at being chosen as correct over Newton. It is a childish thing, he knows, but the words that mean ‘job well done’ have always made him feel like he’s actually HELPED in this damn war. The people FIGHTING the war think his data will help the war, and that makes him feel good.

He knows that what he does is important, but it’s hard to remember that when he’s not the one out there in a Jaeger.

Sometimes he wishes he had been.

 

\-----

 

When he enters the lab the morning of the 11th and finds Newton seizing on the ground, blood pooling at the corner of his mouth from his nose, he’s fairly certain he has a mild heart attack, at the very least. He’s shouting things like ‘Newton how could you be so stupid?’ and ‘What if you’d died, you could still die, you imbecile!’ but it’s all from fear and he manages to get Newton in a chair and a glass of water before bolting out of the room to find Stacker Pentecost.

Watching Newton explain about the Kaiju terrifies him. That can’t be true, they aren’t organized, they can’t be they can’t be they’re just mindless animals in a pattern they can’t possibly- Stacker silences him, and everything starts to fall into a truly horrifying place. He can see it in Newton’s face, in the red ring of hemorrhaging in his eye.

They’re being exterminated.

They’re being hunted and taken down and if they don’t stop it there will be no wonderful future of options and the freedom to make choices for his child. All there will be is death. Dead Vanessa, dead baby, dead Newton, dead Hermann, dead everyone.

The entire world is standing on the edge of a chair stacked too high with things to make it taller, and if they aren’t careful, if they don’t do things just right, then everything will fall and crash and break. There will be too much damage to fix.

If anything is left at all.

 

\-----

 

Hours later, after Newton has left to get a fresh brain from Hannibal Chau, Hermann watches, helpless, as his prediction comes true. A double event, just like he’d said.

He’s never hated being right so much.

He watches as the Wei Tang triplets’ life signs go out, feels a terrible pang in his chest when Cherno Alpha and the Kaidanovskys follow not long after. Hermann swallows the lump in his throat and tries not to think about whether they were his friends or not and about how he’ll never get the chance to ask them now. Thinks about all the rings on their fingers and the silent smiles and the confidence that bled from them like they were made of the stuff.

He tries not to think about how young the Wei Tangs were or how kind the Kaidanovskys were, how both teams weren’t as serious as everyone thought, about how each team loved their Jaeger as much as they loved each other. He tries not to think about it, he can think about it later when they’ve closed the Breach. They will close the Breach, they will. They have to.

Gipsy Danger takes down Leatherback and Otachi, and suddenly Hermann is tired of standing around. He’s been standing around his whole life and he is sick and tired of it. He does the math on the last bit of free chalkboard he has, and he knows that the next event will be three.

It’s not quite midnight when Hermann Gottlieb touches down at the site of Otachi’s fall. He’s had no contact with the man since he left to find Hannibal Chau the day before, and Hermann would be lying if he said he wasn’t worried about him at all. He knows Newton is alive, but being alive and being okay are two different things.

Hermann is literally at ground zero, there are destroyed buildings and piles of rubble everywhere. Upturned and shattered cars, structures turned to ash, it’s impossible to distinguish between what was once a building and what is now a pile of rock. It is a frightening reminder of the things that are rushing at them full sprint. It is a wasteland of rescue crews and Black Market scavengers, PPDC workers and crying civilians milling like ants. Some are trying to find what was once their home, others are trying to clear things away, more are trying to find survivors.

He tries not to think about how many bodies are in those piles of rubble.

Hermann zeroes in on Newton and finds the man surrounded by computer parts and cables. He’s rambling to himself about brain death and about how he can’t find the right coil or the copper spike and- Sweet lord in Heaven.

There is a massive... not as massive as a full grown Kaij, but a... it’s still huge, it’s the size of a city bus, and it’s... It shouldn’t be possible but Hermann has had too many impossible-but-true things thrown at him in the last 48 hours that he knows it to be true. It’s a baby Kaiju, umbilical cord wrapped taut around it’s malformed neck, eyes bulging and seeping Kaiju Blue into the rubble-strewn ground beneath it. As if today couldn’t possibly get any stranger.

“Newton! Newton- I- what do you need help with?”

“WHAT the HELL do you want, Hermann?”

“Have your ears stopped working?” he barks. “What do you need help with?”

Newton whips around, breathing hard and desperate and frantic, eyes wild and bloodshot, blood on his forehead and lapel. He’s filthy and sweaty and smells terrible, and if Hermann has had a panic strewn last two days, than Newton has had a horror-filled one.  

“Help?” he asks.

“Yes, you- yes, help. If my model holds true then we’ll be experiencing a triple event in the next few hours, there’s nothing that I can do to prevent that beyond taking down the Breach. You and I both know that’s the only thing to stop this, and we both are well aware of the fact that we won’t know how to de-stabilize the Breach and collapse the Throat unless we find out more about the Kaiju,” he huffs for a few minutes, and his rant gives Newton a few needed seconds to calm himself down. “And my calculations cannot predict what the Kaiju are thinking, Newton. Drifting with one can. So tell me, what do you need help with?”

Newton swallows hard, closes his eyes for just a second. He inhales.

“Start up the computers, see if you can’t find the copper spike that attaches to those coils near the infant’s head. I’ve been pumping ammonia into this thing since it jumped out of Otachi’s gut early this morning. I’m hoping we can get access to it’s primary before brain death occurs- shit, not hoping, we have to, it’s secondary brain isn’t even friggin’ formed yet, those usually last a lot longer than the primary but this one...” he’s trails off and he’s already digging around on the ground for the squid caps of the pons system. “God damn engineers brought everything over but didn’t bother to order it all correctly...”

Hermann had already jumped into action, though, booting up the computers and balancing the neural bridge code. It’s past midnight when his radio crackles to life, right as Newton is shoving the copper spike into the infant Kaijus skull. He’s had one eye on the clock this entire time, but the news shatters him into stopping all his work at the computer.

Two? Two Kaijus? No no no, his model was correct, his calculations were correct. It was a Fibonacci sequence, it’s always been this sequence. Three is the next, it should be three.

The numbers don’t add up, and Newton is brushing him off as it it’s nothing, as if two and three don’t matter but it most certainly matters, numbers matter. If they get down there and a third erupts from the Breach- there are only two Jaegers left, and one of the pilots is out of commission. He thinks about Vanessa and about the baby and about Jaegers and numbers and odds and about his father and about falling and suddenly he doesn’t give a damn.

It doesn’t even sound like his voice when he volunteers to share the Neural load, but somewhere he thinks maybe he always planned to volunteer for this with Newton.

He doesn’t even feel like himself when he puts the squid cap on his head, clicks the pons into place and tells Newton he’s ready.

For a moment, all he hears are numbers.

Three.

Two.

One.

His entire perception of reality skews and shatters.

This drift is not quite a drift in the strict definition of ‘drifting’, no no this drift is more like rushing rapids in a river which is probably because of the Kaiju brain's influence. He feels like he’s been dipped in-

 

**_-a lake but then he realises that he’s actually in a lake picturing a matrix of flow equations it’s not water it’s fish looking up at a skinny little boy with scabby knees who is humming in chilly waters of Lake Como but how does he know that?_ **

**_“Newt!“_ **

**_“Newt come here!“_ **

**_“Caught a big one!”_ **

 

Oh.

 

**_-he is a child with mud between his toes and his Uncle Gunter is cutting open a bass for him to look at the inside and telling him everything is a puzzle Newt everything fits together be it human or fish or music everything fits the way it’s supposed to fit and sometimes you gotta take the puzzle apart to get a good look at how it fits together-_ **

**_-and then he’s in school and he’s got monster on his t-shirt and he’s skipping grades and everyone is rolling their eyes at hyperactive annoying little Newt-_ **

**_”-takes meds for something I don’t know what but it makes a lot of sense-”_ **

**_“-monster boy-”_ **

**_“-too young for this class why’d they let him in here-”  
_ **   
_**“-runs one of those fetish sites-”**_

**_-jumping grades and jumping schools and suddenly he’s watching Trespasser destroy the San Francisco bridge and suddenly he’s desperate to know everything he can possible whispers about him behind his back at the Jaeger Academy because he’s got tattoos and is fascinated instead of horrified wants to know where they come from what they’re like in their natural habitat they’re just animals you know just big huge dangerous animals I wish we could contain one just one to see if it could be calmed down it’s not in it’s natural environment after all could we even replicate-_ **

**_-tattoos to paint himself not in their image but in remembrance and in appreciation protests long hours under a microscope falling in love with subjects and people and it doesn’t matter man woman or other he just falls into things just like how he falls into his work and it’s fun he has so much fun with his music and his work and with the Kaiju but who’s this douchebag in the sweater vest with the snooty accent hi Vanessa I was talking about a different douchebag with a snooty accent Sylvia I have a new design drinking beer and watching Gamera and laughing at his cousin the only time his brain calms down is when he's with her because she relaxes him with bad movies and warm alcohol and an ink filled needle and good solid familial companionship-_ **

**_-base to base to base to corpses to jars with things in them and he can’t help but murmur ‘It’s alive!’ to himself when he’s alone in a lab surrounded by body parts because come on he’s living in a monster movie can’t anybody else see how surreally hilarious this all sort of is come on why doesn’t anybody get the jokes-_ **

**_-at least he doesn’t underestimate me I’m an idiot because I’m annoying not because of tattoos and music and fascination plus he KNOWS I’m not REALLY stupid-_ **

 

**_-and then it’s like he’s being forced back into his own brain but he’s growing up all over again and it’s like he’s seeing it from an outsider’s perspective instead of his own and he hears both himself and Newton remind themselves not to chase the rabbit or else this won’t work but suddenly he and Newton are plunged into-_ **

 

**_-running in a field outside the school seeing feet and inches and spaces between two points but in his hand there’s an airplane and that’s the only thing that matters he’s laughing and making the noises of the plane and watching the world rush by on a bright summer’s day in the mountains and every breath stings his lungs in a way that means he’s alive._ **

**_“Hermann.”_ **

**_“Hermann!”_ **   
**_“Aren’t you listening?”_ **   
**_“Father’s going to be really upset that you got dirt on your coat.”_ **

**_-little boy with skinned knees and a black eye sitting on the curb waiting for his father to pick him up from school and he’s thinking about how if he moved three feet to the right he’d be equidistant from either end of the street so he knows if he ran to the left right now it would take less time to reach that end of the street than it would the other and he knows his house is to the right so maybe if he started running left he should never stop running-_ **

**_-school is easy math is easy father says life is like that sometime clean up your face for dinner don’t let your mother see that scrape it’ll just upset her-_ **

**_“-ann the German! Hermann the Germ-”_ **   
**_“-talks funny-”_ **   
**_“-big ears I bet he hears everything-”_ **   
**_“-so stupid-”_ **   
**_“-bet he heard that!”_ **   
**_“Good!”_ **

**_-laughter at his expense at his bruised knees and torn jacket and his height and his homework being better than theirs it’s better than theirs why are they laughing I don’t understand no father I don’t want to skip any more levels I just want to do things regular please father I want to fly planes father I just want to see what-_ **

**_-no this is what you’re good at practical and responsible and correct go to school for this do this not that Hermann this is better for you this makes more sense okay father yes father I will father falling feels a bit like flying sharp awful pain not a clean break never the same growth plate surgery cast and a book he passes to Bastien numbers are the language of the universe they will hide me I can hide behind them because they are never angry and they are never wrong they choose no sides and expect nothing they are purely themselves and will never betray me-*_ **

**_-can I build an intelligence that will pass a Turing test and if I could of course I can I must never say anything about it until it is done or father will* suddenly he’s in Anchorage and he can do more than prove Turing he can code robots and six year old Hermann holds a bright red robot and smiles in the sunlight there is more than just coding he can do amazing things he does do amazing things Brawler Yukon is a success and father tells him he won’t prove anything but Vanessa is the only person who ever-_ **

**_“Hermann, will you marry me?”_ **   
**_“What?”_ **   
**_“Well I just thought... We’ve been together and you never... If you don’t want to-”_ **   
**_“Y-yes! Yes! I will, I want to!”_ **

**_-the odds are always against me except they aren’t really are they-_ **

**_-you’re wrong, father absolute wrong he tells his father he’s wrong and he’s not going to listen to him anymore and he slams the door and gets out of there and goes to Vanessa I’ve always wanted to be a pilot and build robots but I was only allowed to do one and Newton Geiszler is the most irritating man I have ever met in my life but God help me if he’s not brilliant I get my best work done when he’s singing show tunes over my shoulder I hate it but it’s true please don’t die please none of us die-_ **

 

And then Hermann Gottlieb feels himself, through Newton Geiszler, unhinge and pull back together again as his memories and Newton’s memories disappear and what they see...

 

**_-cities made of seeping flesh and oceans of genetic sludge, not vats, nothing metallic, all organic slurries of fluid and flesh and bone turned into a civilization and in their minds eye they can see what the cities they know and love will look like someday New York is a pulsing mass of veins and musculature inhabited by crawling clattering creatures with too many eyes and too many teeth Berlin with no more streets just lines of bone and rivers of blue and liquified organic SOMETHING running down where he used to take walks and everything suddenly rolls backwards through a tunnel a throat the throat and organic veiny flaps open up reads something inside of them natural all natural and lets them through and-_ **

**_-all of you will die it is already over you are feeling the last dying impulses in a brain already too far gone to decay we are coming for you and you cannot touch us we have waited and now you will wait for the end we bring you-*_ **

 

Hermann slams back into himself even though he never really left- it doesn’t matter. He rips off the squid cap and yes of course he’s fine is he saying that out loud? Uh oh. His tongue tastes like copper and he feels cold, colder even than the move to Cambridge when he was a boy. The stiff shaking is fading but he’s still trembling, and so is Newt, and he can feel his brain firing off electrical pulses, he thinks.

He’s wired, is the phrase that comes to mind, but it’s not the phrase he would have used.

The world lurches on it’s axis and Hermann vomits rather spectacularly into a conveniently discarded toilet. He can feel his brain rotating back into alignment, and there is a whisper in his mind about death and something else he can’t quite place. Suddenly, he and Newt are finishing each other’s sentences, and it all begins to dawn on them.

It isn’t going to work.

 

\-----

 

The race to get on a helicopter and back to the Shatterdome is fraught with near misses on crowded streets, a torrential downpour in the sky around them, and pure, unadulterated panic that they’re too late the entire run up to the LOCCENT command center.

But they aren’t too late, and they get the message across.

Gipsy Danger crosses through the Breach.

The following minutes are torture, and he keeps thinking things that aren’t his thoughts, keeps hearing things in an internal voice he’s never heard before, relaying information that he’s not well-versed in. HIS internal voice is thinking about Vanessa and the baby and what will happen if this doesn’t work, what they will do now that literally every single Jaeger on Earth is -gone-. He’s wondering how fast they can, if they can, build another Jaeger in case this doesn’t work in case FOUR come out of the Breach like his predictive model foretold because he’s been right so far he’s been right about almost everything and-

 

**_HERMANN CALM DOWN YOU’RE FREAKING ME OUT DUDE_ **

 

His brain goes quiet, and he turns to look at Newt.

“Post Drift connection,” he whispers, but it’s Newt’s thought he thinks, sort of, without quite hearing it.

“I don’t know how I did that,” Newt hisses.

“I know.”

“Just... Panic if it doesn’t work, but not before then.”

Hermann nods. “Y-yes. Yes of course. You’re right. You’re right.” and he forces himself to take breaths, feels the sweat running down his face go cold in the stillness, in the tense moments of waiting and watching Raleigh’s oxygen levels go down. Tendo’s knuckles are white and Herc Hansen has never looked more stricken and pained, and suddenly Hermann is wracked with fear for his own child, not yet born, as well as sympathy for Herc. He can see Newt feel the echos of those emotions and buckle a little bit where he stands, and at the same time Hermann feels the rapid-fire anxiety and thousand-mile an hour thought processes Newt is going through.

The actual words of the thoughts are fading, but it’s almost as if there are more connections in his brain than there were an hour ago. As if Newt’s synapses and his have doubled, and they can feel each other’s firing off thoughts and feelings.

He feels so tall, all of a sudden, like he’s standing on a chair in his father’s study. _This must be what it feels like to fly._ He thinks, and he watches his predictive model of the throat, in real time, collapse.

Feels the surge of relief not just from himself and Newt, but from the entire room around them, feels the joy and exultation as Raleigh Becket reveals himself to be alive and well with Mako Mori, waiting to be picked up.

They didn’t fall.

 

\-----

 

_I’m just happy you’re okay. God, Hermann I was so worried, I wish I’d come with you to Hong Kong. (I know we already had this talk, but still.) You’re alive. That’s all that matters. I cannot wait for you to come home. I can’t wait for you to see the new ultrasounds. I haven’t found out if it’s a girl or a boy yet, I’m waiting for you to be back._

_The news is going absolutely bonkers and nobody has anything solid. I don’t know what’s considered classified or not, but I AM ex-PPDC so I’m sure I still have a certain amount of clearance levels...? ;) Don’t wait until we’re in front of each other to tell me everything!!_

_I miss you._

_Love, Vanessa (and fetus.)_

_P.S._   
_The blowfish I mentioned a few days ago? The one with the blue spines that was glowing? It’s getting stronger. We had to add ammonia to the water, I wish we’d thought of it sooner. If we’re careful, I think we can breed the blue out of them, so to speak!_

 

It is very early morning on January 13th, 2025.

His nose is plugged with tissue, his left eye is ringed with red, and he isn’t sure how to respond to Vanessa. Well, that’s not entirely true, he knows exactly how to respond, it’s the starting that’s the trouble.

Because so much has happened, really.

Everyone else is enjoying the festivities, everyone else is crying and laughing and cheering and mourning. He will too, in time, but for now he is alone in the lab, quiet save for the soft bubbling of tubes and containment tanks on Newton’s- no, Newt’s side.

Hermann brushes fingers across the keyboard and thinks about where to begin, but he doesn’t get the chance to start.

“Hey.”

“Newt. Shouldn’t you be out celebrating?”

“Well I was, I am- the Russian engineers brought out the heavy Vodka, I might be a little bit drunk, but I only had a sip.” he waves the idea of intoxication away. “Not the point. Wanted to make sure you were doing good, buddy.”

“I am... doing well, actually. Trying to write back to Vanessa... Buddy?”

Newt shrugged. “Hey, I have intimate knowledge of your brain and all your issues, just like you’ve got all of mine, I think that qualifies us as at least friends. Ten years and a first hand view of each other’s childhood trauma, plus the images of untold horror in another dimension-”

“I know, Newt, do shut up before you give yourself another nosebleed,” Newt lifts his hands and Hermann sighs. “I merely meant...”

He flexes his fingers, lost for words. Newt, to his credit, waits for a response. The connection from a few hours before is long gone. No more nerve-endings alight with new information and knowledge, no more thoughts transmitted across thin air. Still... There is a degree of understanding that wasn’t there before. The same sort you get from divulging your life’s secrets with a dear friend. That, in particular, is not something Hermann has ever had before, he realizes.

“I have never had just... a friend, before. I do not get along with people, as you’ve made certain to point out whenever possible. Colleagues, coworkers, I can work with those. I understand those. I'm not sure what to do with friends.”

“We haven’t exactly been very cool to one another the last decade, have we?”

“That’s a very kind way to put it. I have to admit, had I made the effort to get to know you better, we probably could have been... ‘buddies’ much sooner.” he taps on the keyboard for a moment, not writing, just tapping.

Newt stretches and locks his hands on his hips. “Yeah well... guess the blame goes to me too, I didn’t exactly ever cut you any slack for being such a stuffed shirt. Guys like you kinda kicked my ass all throughout school and stuff...”

“If you were too abrasive, then I was too stubborn. I never bothered getting close to anyone.”

“You did with Vanessa."

Hermann glares at him, but opens his mouth, closes it, and then says- “She's... different. It was the first time I ever did. I will never regret it, of course, it should have been a lesson to me.”

Newt grins. “It wasn’t, but so what? You’re a stubborn jackass, Hermann, everybody knows that. Anyway it doesn’t matter, you’ve got one now. We do pretty damn good together, don’t we? And we don't have to be BFFs to be that. You don't need friendship bracelets to be a good partner, is what I'm getting at. We don't even need to like each other, really.”

The corners of Hermann Gottlieb’s lips twitch, and he inclines his head. The words were harsh, but he sort of... understood. “That's true.”

“So... Friends?”

Hermann nods, and he smiles up at Newt. “I suppose so. But don’t expect me to ever refer to you as such.”

“There’d be something wrong with you if you did. Also, don’t think this means I’m changing anything either, I’m still going to harass the shit out of you.”

Hermann finds it in him to glower, but there’s a quirk to his lips that mean he might be fighting a smirk. “And I will continue to discount your work ethic as childish and irritating.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Indeed.”

“Want me to save you any Vodka?”

“No, thank you.”

“Gonna name your kid after me?”

“Not in a million years.”

Newt laughs. “Worth a shot!”

And like that he’s gone. But Hermann knows, somehow, that Newt will be back, and he was being honest about not changing. Hermann isn’t sure where the world will take them in the coming months and years, what a post-Kaiju world will be like. He has no idea what the odds are that the Kaiju might come back, no idea as to where his work will take him next. With no Kaiju, after all, it’s hard to say where he will go and what he will do. He could always go back to engineering, back to proving the Turing test... Maybe he could get a Pilot’s License.

He’d been very singularly focused on this job for a very long time, it was interesting to see a world ahead where he had a lot of opportunities, and a lot of options open to him.

The letter to Vanessa begins simply.

 

_What happened?_

_What DIDN’T happen might be a better question. In the last few days I have drifted with a Kaiju, been correct in several predictions about the Breach events, assisted in sending a Jaeger through the Breach, helped destroy a pathway to another world filled with monsters the likes of which we could never imagine, and after drifting with a Kaiju, became friends with Newton Geiszler._

_It has been, to put it mildly, a busy week._

_But you want to know everything, and maybe it’s the after effects of the Drift, but I am ready to talk your ear off, darling._

_So let’s do this thing._

He is 35 years old.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Passages with * after them are taken directly from the drift sequences in the Novelization. Therefore, I do not own them, they are not mine, and are only used for effect while I add to a situation.
> 
> Also- The Timeline on the Wiki puts the Otachi/Leatherback attack on the 8th, while the final battle with Raiju/Scunner/Slattern, and the trip through the drift takes place on the 12th. The movie obviously condenses this, so I've done the same and made the whole affair happen on the 11th, still within the week of Hermann's prediction of the double event. The Raiju/Scunner/ Slattern battle still takes place on the 12th, of course.
> 
> The Kaidanovskys- I subscribe to the mute!Aleksis headcanon, and I wanted to explore it a bit here, as well as give Hermann a connection to those two, who I feel he would have become great friends with, had they... You know. ; -;
> 
> Stay tuned for an epilogue, and maybe something else from me, if you liked this...


	4. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The future depends on what you do today."  
> Mahatma Gandhi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Towards the end, Annelise and Paloma are the names of Hermann's mother and Vanessa's mother. We don't know Hermann's mom's name, so I just kinda gave her one. And of course, we know very little about Vanessa, so I gave her mom a name I've always been a bit fond of.
> 
> We learned a lot about Vanessa the other day!!! Travis Beacham said she's a model, and I think I'm gonna work that into her past/future in some later fic. She still has a Marine Biology degree, as far as this goes.

**February 2nd, 2025**

 

Vanessa Gottlieb is both everything and nothing like Raleigh Becket expected.

She looks like the pregnant woman he expected, yes, wears the sweater and the maternity pants and the sensible shoes. She has her hair bunched up on her head and a thin pair of glasses on the bridge of an incredibly cute nose. She carries herself well and has the biggest smile he’s seen since he woke up to Mako on the escape pods.

On the other hand, and while he’s a bit ashamed to think like that, she is way too pretty for what he imagined, way too pretty for Hermann. She’s a knockout, long legs, taller than Hermann and Newt, smooth skin. If she wasn’t so frumpily dressed and incredibly pregnant he’d have no trouble seeing her on the cover of a magazine or something. He has to remind himself that she’s an acclaimed ex-member of the PPDC’s K-Science division and expert Marine Biologist

At the same time, she does her best run down the hallway to fling her arms around Hermann and pull him into a hug, kissing him spectacularly to one or two hoots and hollers from the Russian engineering team as they troop down into the Jaeger bay. She’s laughing and planting kisses all over his face, and Raleigh has never seen Hermann so red in the face and so ridiculously pleased. He’s fawning over her belly and lacing their hands together and quietly speaking to her about something, and she’s telling him that she got a phonecall that she has to talk to him about. Raleigh suddenly takes back his thought of Vanessa being too pretty for Hermann, because just being next to his wife has taken at least ten years off the man’s face. The lines smooth out the smile is huge to match Vanessa’s. He looks his actual age, instead of the crotchety old man guise he tended to sport.

Raleigh watches the scientist lead his wife down the hall towards the K-Science lab, and he turns to look down at Mako, who lifts her eyebrows comically.

The two start laughing at the same moment.

“Has Herc said anything about what’s going on yet?”

“Not yet. I think he wants to get today done before he gives us any more news, good or bad.”

“Makes sense. You gonna be okay?”

“Today? No. But we have tomorrow.”

“That we do.”

 

\-----

 

Newton Geiszler is exactly how Vanessa remembers him, except with one eye ringed in red, and more tattoos than she recalled seeing him with last. For the most part, however, he is pretty much the same, same hair, same glasses, same several days worth of beard growth, same too-skinny tie to match his too-skinny jeans.

The biggest difference is that, instead of being hunched over some Kaiju organ, he’s prodding a handful of curious-looking pellets into a large tank on his side of the lab. Inside it is several inches of what, from even a few feet away, clearly smells like ammonia, a couple of scaly-looking rocks, and a massive pill bug clattering around the chemicals in the tank. It almost looks like it’s playing, but Vanessa can recognize animals bathing better than most people. Especially what looks like a semi-aquatic critter.

“Newton- I thought we agreed you wouldn’t bring that thing in the lab while Vanessa was here-”

“Relax, Hermann, Hendrix here just needed some more fluid. Plus I think he might dig these little protein supplements from the mess. Easier to roll him in than drag a gallon of ammonia to my room.”

“I won’t have noxious chemicals-”

“It’s okay, _querido_ ,” she loves that he goes red at the endearment. “I made the trip fine, a little cleaning solution on the other side of the room isn’t going to kill me, or the baby.”

“See? I knew I liked her better than you.”

Hermann harrumphs.

“Sticking around ‘til the bun’s ready to come out of the oven, then?”

“Maybe. If Hermann can get released from clean up duty before the end of the month, we’ll head home, but he wants to be around for the imminent arrival. This seemed like the safest bet.”

“Awww, Hermann getting all sentimental, that’s adorable. Has he been knitting baby booties too? Why haven’t I seen them? Can we arrange playdates with baby Gottlieb and Hendrix?”

She realizes ‘Hendrix’ is the five-eyed critter in the tank.

Her husband is an incredibly private man, she’d known that getting into a relationship with him, had known that marrying him, and had known that having a child with him. She’d had to witness his father’s lack of faith in him firsthand just to get Hermann to talk to her about the parts of his life he didn’t like. It’s one of many things she loves about him, how dearly he holds things to his heart, how privacy means intimacy to him, being let in means he truly cares. He’d let Newton in, recently, and she was actually thrilled about that, had wanted them to get along for a long time now, but had resigned herself to it being impossible due to... Incompatibility. But as it was, they were very compatible. In their own way.

But ‘letting someone in’ and ‘getting along’ were apparently two very different things Without much warning, Hermann is shaking a finger at Newt and the two are off around the room. Hermann following his colleague around while Newt searches through tubes and bottles and sheafs of paper, looking for something as Hermann lectures and berates about bringing a child into contact with a ten-legged alien parasite will never happen and that it’s on par with child abuse to even suggest such a thing.

“-and another thing-!”

“Another thing? You just listed ten things, how many more things can you complain about after a two minute exchange?”

Curiously, Vanessa inspects the large tank that houses the skin louse, and she eyes it critically. The creature is rather slow, sluggishly curled in the chemical water of the tank. She’s no expert on the Kaiju, but she is an expert on certain animal behaviour, and the way the parasite is acting doesn’t look particularly natural. Newt’s clearly not paying attention, and it’s largely her husband’s fault of course, but she finds it feels a bit like telling the kids the play date is over when she calls to Newton.

“Newt? What’s the temperature these guys operate in?”

“Blah blah blah is all I ever hear from you- What? They tend to figure in a bit lower than what the Kaiju clock in at, ‘bout 85 degrees. I’ve been keeping it warm in my room for him.”

“Well it’s kept really low in the lab for dissection, right? It’s warmer since you have nothing out, but it’s still pretty cold in here. Little guy doesn’t look like he’s enjoying it at all.” she gestured at the tank.

“Shit! I didn’t think I’d be here long enough to cause a reaction to the temperature change, this means that temperature drop is also why they die so fast once the Kaiju are killed. Shit!” he scrambled across the room, pressing his face against the glass of the tank at the lethargic parasite. “Crap, crap crap crap I gotta get him back to my room- I’ll see you guys later at the thing!”

He’s gone before proper goodbyes can be made, wheeling the tank out of the room. Vanessa can hear the echo of “Out of the way! Very important skin louse coming through! I said move!”

“He’s going to be the death of me.”

“At least it’s good practice.” she pats her belly, grinning impishly at him.

Hermann smiles. “Fair enough. You said you had something to tell me earlier?”

“Oh right. I know you’re not going to like hearing it but... Your father called me a few days ago-” she watches his face sour and pats his cheek. “He wants to talk to you, _querido_. He sounded very strained. I don’t think an apology is in the works, or even an admission of being wrong... But I think he wants to patch things up.”

Hermann glowers and grips the head of his cane. “He’s had plenty of opportunities to patch things up over the last five years, though he’s never done it.”

“Because he’s YOUR father. You’re both incredibly stubborn men, it took you ten years and Drifting with Newt just to decide to tolerate the man, and it’s taken your whole life for him to maybe admit to himself that he was wrong about your work. Wrong about you. Would you rather he die and have a thousand things you wish you’d said?”

“He’s not-”

“No, but parents go before their children, Hermann. They’re supposed to, anyway.” Brutal honesty, as always. It was the best way to get the facts across to a man as stubborn as Hermann, and she was incredibly good at it. Her own parents were long gone, and she herself lived with plenty of regrets in regards to them. “He’s not going to be around forever.”

Hermann’s face goes tight, and she can see the thought processes going. “You’re right, quite right. I’ll... call him, soon. Maybe tonight.”

Vanessa leans over and kisses him. “It’ll be better in the long run, you know.”

“I know, I know... He’s an incredibly frustrating man, you know!” he sighs, heavily.

She laughs, chuckling before she reaches into her pocket and grins at him.

“There is... One other thing.” she pulls a small folded envelope from her pocket and holds it up. “I haven’t looked yet, but I asked the doctor to write it down. If you feel like spoiling the surprise...”

“That’s the-”

“Oh yes. Want to look? I do, but I don’t know if I can keep it secret from you once I know.” she grins wickedly.

He bites his lip, and then nods. “Alright then.”

She tears into the paper and unfolds the page inside, and they both look down to see, in big bold letters: Girl.

A girl.

 

\-----

 

He thinks about how he can put a name to her now. The little not-yet-a-person that exists in his wife’s belly, that doesn’t know anything but darkness and the beat of her mother’s heart. They’d thrown names around, of course, boy and girl and unisex titles, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes familial, sometimes archaic. But it’s never been anything solid, and while he knows there’s always the chance that she might really be a he or neither at all, this is who she will be born as.

It’s very real, now. Not just ‘baby’ or ‘imminent arrival’ or the oft-added postscript of ‘fetus’ in emails between himself and Vanessa. Such vague terms, but now she can have a name. Hermann calls her lots of things in his mind when he thinks about it, now, like Karla and Annelise* and Paloma* and Sasha.

But those are all names of people who already live or have gone from their lives. He’s not sure if those are the right names to give.

The thought of those lost hits him, and he remembers where he is.

It’s mid-afternoon, the sun is high, and they’re on an aircraft carrier just offshore of the mainland. Beneath them, though no one can see, are the final watery graves of Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon.

It’s an impossibly bright, brisk day on the ocean. Every worker, every technician, everyone is lined up and standing on the deck of the carrier, staring out onto the horizon as the casket-bearers make their way down the middle and settle them all into place on the stands. Seven in all, for the Kaidanovskys, the Wei Tangs, Stacker Pentecost, and Chuck Hansen.

The ceremony itself is not a very formal one. It’s hard to be, with differing military customs for each and the stipulations of each individuals Will. The Wei Tangs, for example, had been recovered and cremated as they’d wished, spread on the Ocean several days ago by what was left of their family and friends. The Kaidanovskys, Pentecost, and Chuck? No bodies to recover. No, all these caskets are empty, draped in a PPDC flag each and lined up beside each other.

They don’t call attention, they don’t read any scripture. No, instead, each member of their respective crew passes by the caskets, says a goodbye, goes back to their station. Some get up and make speeches, tell anecdotes, talk about the relationships they’d had with the pilots. Each one is a tear-filled confession of how much these pilots meant to everyone involved. The entire Chinese engineering crew huddles up towards the end and clings to each other, foreheads together and finding strength in shared grief. The Russians are incredibly stoic, keeping it to themselves for the most part.

Marshal Hercules Hansen stays somber and quiet the entire affair. He doesn’t need to say anything, Hermann realizes. There’s no one to speak any words to, now. Not for him.

Raleigh Becket doesn’t say anything, but Mako Mori speaks for several minutes about the future and about how she won’t let Stacker’s drive die out. She won’t let the world forget this, won’t let them hide behind a wall, she says.

Halfway through, Vanessa’s feet begin to get terribly sore, and he can’t find a chair for her, but he offers her his cane and she laughs, taking it with a smile.

At the end, the firing squad lines up, fires three times for each casket, out into open water. They play each country’s national anthem, and the ceremony is over. There are hugs and hand clasps and tears, some laughter.

He thinks he should have gone up and said something, but he has no idea what he would have say. No clue how he’d address these people that he didn’t really know. He respected Stacker, admired Chuck, envied the Wei Tangs, in a way, for having such a close relationship as brothers. (His own brothers are less than involved in his life, much like his father.) He’d been... almost friends with the Kaidanovskys.  He thinks about how the odds had never been in any of their favor, but they’d given it their damned best shot regardless.

He’d had every opportunity to get to know them, though. He simply hadn’t tried.

He thinks maybe this time he will take the lesson life gives him.

“Vanessa?”

“I need to find a chair- yes?”

“What do you think of Rosalind?”

“Rosalind... As in Franklin?”

“The woman whose work lead to the discovery of the double helix, yes. It’s good name, don’t you think? Rosa, Rosalind.” he mutters, holding out an arm for her as they head inside to find a place to sit down. “Not set in stone, of course, but it’s an idea.”

“No hidden meaning behind it for you?”

“I just think it’s a good name.”

“Oh it is, it definitely is. Rosalind. I like it. I definitely like it. What do you think for a middle name?”

“Maybe your mother’s name?”

“You’re surprisingly sentimental when you want to be, _querido_.”

He makes a noncommittal noise in his throat, and he can see her enjoying the way his ears turn red.

“In any case... we can talk more about it, after you've had some rest.”

He can feel her squeeze his hand, feels the pad of her thumb on his palm. Remembers that the odds were they would lose, and they won. He remembers that she asked him to marry him, when he thought the odds were she would say no. Recalls that the odds were he would never be able to tolerate Newton Geiszler, and now he can admit to himself that he’s fond of the man.

“Are you going to call your father tonight?"

Remembers that despite the odds they would lose, he put his faith in the Jaeger program. Put his faith in the people around him, when he hadn’t even bothered to get to know them.

He decides that maybe the odds are not the way to gauge everything in the world.

"I think... Not tonight."

"Hermann-"

"Tomorrow. Most definitely tomorrow. There is a tomorrow, Vanessa, those pilots made sure of it. He can wait until tomorrow."

"You will call him though, won't you?"

He heaves a great sigh, but it's a melodramatic one, and he enjoys the smirk she gives him.

"There is an 86% chance I'll call him tomorrow."

He does, of course, call him first thing in the morning, in his father's respective time zone. 

It is a loud call, for quite some time, but towards the end it settles, and while the note they leave off on is not necessarily a positive one... There is potential. 

Three days later, he's given leave to go home with Vanessa.

Rosalind Gottlieb is born, to his great chagrin and Newton's incredibly glee, on April 1st, 2025. 

Remarkable.

 


End file.
